When the chips are down

One of my colleagues was telling a story the other day about "shavings" and how all of the little things we do pile can pile up and eventually, we have a mountain. It reminded me of a story I heard about the British cycling team, where they improved everything they did by 1% in a process they called, "the aggregation of marginal gains" - a philosophy that pulled every piece of what goes into cycling apart, improved it and then as the theory goes, once all the pieces are put back together, the gains made are significant.

I like this philosophy.

I didn't know of it at the time, but the philosophy behind my own business is, a bit at a time, you can change everything, where the focus is on personal development through key skill growth. It seems simple and perhaps pithy, but when applied consistently over an extended period of time, the results can be outstanding.

In many ways, it is like the bees that collect this micro particles of pollen from thousands of flowers and then, bring them together to sustain an entire hive and, produce honey. In many ways, it "shouldn't be possible" but nature is the queen of aggregating marginal gains with the supreme patience that has seen us evolve through millions of years and multiple species to become what we are today. It is quite incredible.

If it ain't broke.

Yet, we as individuals only live a single lifetime and therefore, there is a timer on how long we have to evolve ourselves and only so far we can change and because of this, we likely feel rushed. We feel we don't have the time for the aggregation of of marginal gains and try to cut corners to force results and get what we want sooner. However, there is the "slow and steady" lesson of the tortoise and the hare that we should remember where, speed doesn't necessarily get us there faster, especially if we run out of energy half way through the race.

I feel that culture these days draws our attention and energy in ways that means that before we get the results we are after, we are pulled to chase another result, so what happens is that we keep investing ourselves, but not for long enough to make any significant inroads. This means that because our investment is too low for the task requirements, our investment is lost - like trying to build a mansion with 10,000 dollars - it is just going to burn through the money, and there won't even be a whole in the ground to show for it.

Do you think about what you do each day?

If when you wake up next, you had to choose one tony thing to focus on to improve your life, what would it be? and Then, what would it be the day after? Of course, you'd likely need to make some of these habitual, so what if the focus was daily for a month on each thing, so that in a year from now, you would have improved 12 tiny components of your life and committed them to a a habitual process - what would change?

Five years from now with 60 things?

Five years sounds like a long time, but it really is not much more than a blink and if consistently improving in this way, the aggregated result from process development is almost guaranteed to be significantly better than today. And, it won't take five years to see the results, as they will be compounding from the very first day positive changes are made.

I was thinking about this in terms of investing too, where for example, those small amounts of money that get wasted on very little of value, add up to significant amounts a year from now. For example, how many people actually quit smoking and take that same income and invest it instead? What difference would that make in that five year view? For example in Finland, a pack a day smoker spends 3100€ a year on cigarettes, the equivalent of about an average monthly salary before taxes.

That is a significant amount put into investments over the next 20 years and calculated at a conservative 5% interest a year, it amounts to 114K euros, or the price of a small investment property for rental. The rent on that is around 700 a month, so that means that 20 years down the track, the saving on the cigarettes has bought an apartment outright and is doubling the cost of the cigarettes in positive earnings, effectively tripling the value, plus the ownership of the apartment on top, to provide an average monthly income, passively.

All those shavings add up.

But, it is hard to do, because our attention is constantly drawn to those shiny consumables that makes us feel that we are missing out for not buying, not taking part. We feel we are "suffering" yet when we actually look at what causes the most suffering in our lives, it isn't because we aren't smoking enough, watching enough TV, wearing the most expensive clothes or driving the fanciest car - for most of us, the suffering is because we do not have enough money to comfortably buy basics and because we re "investing" what we have poorly, we never will.

The hardest part of this isn't the understanding of it, it is the investment into the application of it until there is a behavioral change. It isn't good enough to know, it has to be done.

I struggle with this daily.

I don't know many who don't.